Forget the dead white guy writer

We in the fan club think J.D. Salinger wrote a few good stories(not including Catcher in the Rye, which has not stood the test of time—ask anyone under 20!) and then coasted for the rest of his life. Nice job if you can get it! He could have been as over-rated as John Updike if he’d written more.

We have not been successful in recruiting DGF to trash JDS so we’ll move on to something much more interesting.

Susie Boyt has agreed to join the fan club! We are not sure which is more astonishing—that she agreed or that we were bold enough to ask her! Perhaps now we’ll summon the nerve to invite Geraldine Brooks.

To say Susie Boyt writes about fashion is like saying William Faulkner wrote about farming. She ventures broad and deep through philosophy and psychology. Her ethical and decorating sensibilities are finely tuned. She can make it perfectly clear how a particular dress, worn in a particular way to a particular occasion, can be a deeply moral act.

We have long been fans of hers, reading her columns aloud to one another at meetings. But a recent one of hers, appearing after we’d been made furious by valances, sent us into an ecstasy of identification. You see, Susie Boyt is embarrassed by pelmets (look it up). http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/976b0a58-cfe0-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.html

SB is obsessed with Judy Garland and Henry James. She said the most wonderful thing about her HJ obsession in her autobiography: “The question that intrigued me in terms of both love and work was this: how can one be good and live fully in the world without taking on all any of the taint that the word 'worldly' carries.”

We are honoured to have Susie Boyt as a member of the club and to make her an honorary Southern Lady.